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james who would you recommend as authority? I would love to learn some tricks of the SEO trade

I understand that ads don't count. What other ways are there?

Thanks all, I'm glad 75% of you agree with my method. Thanks for the input!

This brought up another question. should the review page (which now has a canonical to the item page) be Index,follow?

To create a better customer experience, rather then remove discontinued product from a site, we remove many links from the page, and remove it from the navigation of the site, but we keep the url and show that the product can no longer be purchased. This keeps the links, keeps the content, and gives customers the opportunity to find other products we have. But I often wonder if we should allow this items to just 404 and be done with them. Here is an example. http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-dyn-bm5a-list. Any advice?

Wow. That makes a lot of sense! I kept thinking I wanted the rating page to be important, but you make my error so obvious! Thank you!!

This brought up another question. should the review page (which now has a canonical to the item page) be Index,follow?

My item review pages are showing up with Duplicate Content errors in MOZ. Here are two examples

http://www.americanmusical.com/ItemReview--i-HAM-SK1-LIST

http://www.americanmusical.com/ItemReview--i-MAC-203680902-LIST

is the problem that the pages contain the same code and questions with very little customer created info?

thanks again!

I'm looking at the id= reference. I have:

<meta id="ctl00_robots" name="ROBOTS" content="robots" /><meta id="ctl00_googlebot" name="GOOGLEBOT" content="googlebot" />

What would you change that to?

Thank you, I appreciate the time you spend to understand and answer my question!

I am happy with my URLs and my ecommerce site ranks well over all, but I have a question about product URL's. Specifically when the products have multiple attributes such as "color".

I use a header URL in order to present the 'style' of products,

www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-LIST

and I  allow each 'color' to have it's own URL so people can send or bookmark a specific item.

www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-ANCH1

www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-WRCH1

I use a rel canonical to show that the header URL is the URL search engines should be indexing and to avoid duplicate content issues from having the exact same info, MP3's, PDF's, Video's accessories, etc on each specific item URL. I also have a 'noindex no follow' on the specific item URL.

These header URLs rank well, but when using tools like SEOMoz, which I love, my header pages fail for using rel canonical and 'noindex no follow'

I've considered only having the header URL, but I like the idea of shoppers being able to get to the specific product URL.

Do I need the no index no follow? Do I even need the rel canonical? Any suggestions?

Alan,

nice cat!

As you can see I am not technical, but I will give to the guys that are on Monday morning.

My programming staff always laughs at how I explain things. I have never heard anyone explain the difference between a forward and a back slash like that before, but I am sure I will never forget it now!

Thank you very much!

If I click on the AMS logo, or anywhere that goes to the home page, I get the /.

I've attached a screen shot. Thank you!

XzKUW

my main URL is www.americanmusical.com, SEOMOZ shows I have a duplicate page title on www.americanmusical.com/. I have the think the backslash is causing other issues. I noticed when I first go to my site it is without the /, but if I navigate to the home page, the URL has the / in it. Any ideas on if this is a problem or how to handle it?